the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.